Half Moon Island

We almost walked right into a couple of fur seals. They blended right into the rocks so well. They barked a lot and seemed not to want humans to come too close. Fine with me. This picture here looks like it's just all rocks (and penguins in the distance), but there is actually a fur seal here. Click on the picture to see if you can spot him. Click here if you want to see where he is.

There were a lot of chinstraps here going about their chinstrap business. The level of activity in a penguin colony never ceased to amaze me. You'll never see anything like that in a zoo. There were several penguin skeletons around the area. Some of them still had the flippers and the feet, but everything else had been eaten.

There was an old whaling boat here, too. I was surprised that it hadn't washed away. Maybe it had and it keeps turning up on a different island every year?

When we returned to the ship we were invited to see a very temporary aquarium set up by the ship's whale biologist, Ingrid. Apparently, on her Zodiac shuttle rides to and from the ship that day, she stopped to scoop up some interesting creatures from the sea. The "aquarium" was just a large, clear piece of tupperware that the ship's crew probably uses to wash dishes in.

This is a pink ctenophore (ten' - o - fore). It is a relative of the jellyfish. It is considered zoo-plankton, which is essentially plankton that's large enough to see without a microscope. The ctenophores are fragile -- we couldn't touch them else they could fall apart.

They came in different sizes and different colors, such as this orange ctenophore. You might be able to pick out a couple of racing stripes that travel down the sides of the organism. These stripes are composed of cilia (sil - ee - uh) that propel the organism through the water. The cilia always seemed to be active -- it looked like a stream of Las Vegas showlights traveling across the marquee -- even when the thing wasn't going anywhere. I wondered how and where it thought it was going?

You might also be able to see a small, brown blob with wings on the extreme left of the orange ctenophore. This little butterfly plankton was flapping around the whole tank as if it were on some kind of mission. It's wings moved as fully as an eagles, but it only traveled about a centimeter with each funny flap. On the extreme right of the orange ctenophore you can barely pick out another version of zoo-plankton. These were fairly plentiful and relatively uninteresting and inactive.

Another weird creature Ingrid swiped from the sea was this salp. This is me holding it; it's not too fragile. It looked and felt like Jell-O, but it tasted more like tuna (just kidding). Ingrid explained that the salp can grow up to twice the size of a human -- in fact she said she knew of a guy who was scuba diving that swam INSIDE of one on purpose!! What a nutcase. The large brown rock inside of it over my ring finger and close to my pinky is its gonad. The small greenish rock over my ring finger and close to my middle finger is its excrement. What a lovely animal.

When the zoo-plankton lesson was over, Ingrid returned the creatures to their home in the sea. We headed for our final destination, Penguin Island. For some reason the name just didn't provoke a lot of excitement in me. As it turned out, the weather was too gusty to make a safe landing. We had to skip Penguin Island, remarkably the only landing that we had to call off on the entire trip! I wasn't that sad.

We headed for Elephant Island to have a look at the last place Earnest Shackleton and his men refuged in 1917 after being stranded in the Antarctic for more than 1.5 years. A truly amazing story that you must read if you plan on visiting the Antarctic, and even if you don't. You can find a wonderful abridged account in National Geographic (and even in the April or May 1999 People Magazine!), or you can read Shackleton's own account in his book, South.

After the Drake Passage back north (the return trip blessed us with 6 meter swells both days. Ugh!), it was off to the Falkland Islands...